Nozick: Anarchy, State, and Utopia

I'm a bit surprised to have not seen this book mentioned before. Nozick was a philosophy professor at Harvard and this book was a libertarian response to John Rawls' Theory of Justice which was essentially an argument for "liberal egalitarianism" which states that any inequalities in a just society must be to the benefit of the least well off. While Nozick's book isn't only an attack on Rawls, he presents an argument demonstrating how liberty disrupts patterned theories of distribution, such as the one Rawls offers. If you search for the Wilt Chamberlain Argument you'll find information about this (in googling it I interestingly found the first thing to come up was a page by one of my philosophy professors at Univ. of Missouri).

In any case the book is a great and challenging read for the most in depth philosophical defense of libertarianism of which I am aware.

The book begins:
'Individuals have rights, and there are things no person or group may do to them (without violating their rights). So strong and far-reaching are these rights that they raise the question of what, if anything, the
state and its officials may do."